Lafayette, California – If you’re a longtime BART rider, you know that the transit system just made a major change.
You no longer need to purchase a physical or even digital Clipper card. Anyone can tap a credit card at the fare gate in order to access BART.
It’s a great convenience factor, and it’s fantastic for your out-of-town guests who might not know how to use the Clipper system. But according to BART, this new convenience comes with a potential risk.
Here’s a sign about it:
Lots of BART riders – myself included – have long accessed BART by quickly mashing our entire wallets on the card reader. When the reader was configured to only read Clipper cards, this worked great. Even if my Clipper card was buried deep inside my wallet, the reader would pick up its signal and let me through.
Now that the reader accepts credit cards in addition to Clipper cards, though, the technique of “mash your wallet or purse on the reader and hope for the best” could result in you being double or even triple charged for your next BART ride.
Why is that? If you tap your whole wallet or bag on the reader, there’s a risk that it will pick up multiple credit cards at the same time.
It will then register as if you entered BART several times—once on each card. It’s called “card clash” and it’s a documented issue.
When you fail to scan all of the same cards upon exiting the system, BART’s automated payment system might flag you for having missed the exit scan, or might even think that you jumped the turnstile and didn’t pay.
All the cards you mistakenly scanned with that single tap could then potentially end up getting charged a fee—or even a fine for misuse.
BART says they’re actively taking steps to prevent this from happening, and they’ve posted prominent signs around several stations explaining the potential error, as you can see at the Lafayette, California station above.
Luckily, there’s a simple way to avoid being charged multiple times. Instead of tapping your whole wallet or bag on the Clipper card reader, simply take out a single card—Clipper card or credit card—and tap it once. When you exit, remember to tap the same card at the exit gate.
The same advice applies if you have a cell phone wallet that holds credit cards on the back of your phone. If you try to pay with Apple Pay while cards are resting alongside your phone, they could inadvertently be charged.
Again, just make sure to tap a single card at a time, and you can avoid this expensive fate!
